A self-described pothead dropout, Ron De Jesus got into dance by hanging out with his girlfriend–a dance student–some 20 years ago at Northeastern Illinois University. Previously he’d partnered her in a few “Hispanic events” at Roberto Clemente High School, in numbers where “she’d carry a basket of peanuts and wear her little Copacabana outfit,” as he puts it. But at NIU Dame Libby Komaiko, artistic director of the school’s resident Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater, took him under her wing and insisted he get his GED and enroll in college. “When I had a choice between underwater basket weaving at 8 AM and a dance class at 11,” he says, “I took dance.”
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Soon he was performing flamenco with Ensemble Espanol and auditioning–supporting himself with the dancer’s usual patchwork of performing and teaching gigs. He landed a job with Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, a multicultural company that performed in the style of Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham. From there he went to Tara Mitton’s modern-dance Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble, based at the Ruth Page Theater, where he met Larry Long–“a great supporter”–who got him into ballet classes and eventually into the Ruth Page Nutcrackers (“I went from a mouse to a parent and finally to a lead”). Once De Jesus started teaching at Hubbard Street, artistic director Lou Conte invited him to audition. And for the last 17 years De Jesus, 38, has called Hubbard Street Dance Chicago home. But even now some of his relatives ask, “Are you still with that little dance troupe?”
Without an immediate go-ahead from the business office, however, Begin couldn’t start right away; De Jesus walked into his first rehearsal with no music whatsoever. “The dancers carried me,” he says. De Jesus had developed the concept for the piece after reading the work of “urban shaman” Gabrielle Roth, who advocates dancing for oneself in five “rhythms”: flowing, staccato, chaotic, lyrical, and still. Maybe it was time, he reasoned last December, to choreograph a piece inspired by “all the waves” she talks about. He started giving the dancers lists of images (“boiling water, Niagara Falls”), and they started improvising. “It was scary but kinda fun,” he says. “They had an opportunity to be true participants, collaborators. It wasn’t the usual assembly line of dance.” De Jesus–who performs the piece with Jamy Meek, Kendra Moore, Greg Sample, and Lauri Stallings–would finish rehearsals and “dash to Jerome’s house, where we’d talk about the music. It was a very sensitive process, and there was no time for errors.”
